So, while you might be quick to think "we still need to burn fossil fuels to produce this hydrogen", the point is, currently it's a WASTE material.
That's in the eye of the beholder. Solid oxide fuel cells can use carbon monoxide as fuel just as well as hydrogen. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance. The guy who first prepared it in 1776 by heating ZnO and coke even thought he had made hydrogen because the blue flame it produces is so similar. I don't have numbers for CO and H2 handy, and if I did I'd be too lazy to check, but I'd suspect that burning a mole of CO releases more energy than burning a mole of H2, just by virtue of the fact that this bacterium makes its living converting H2O + CO -> CO2 + H2.
I assume they're carbon based life forms
Of course they are. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance and is surprisingly inert. It kills you by forming a stable complex with the hemoglobin in your blood. It adheres to binding sites meant for oxygen (cyanide has an even greater affinity) and ruins the entire hemoglobin molecule. Bacteria generally have no use for oxygen binding and transport proteins, and do not use hemoglobin or any other heme-containing protein (except for nitrogen-fixing bacteria), so in general one would not expect them to care about carbon monoxide- although being able to eat it is impressive.
Here at Agilent we love agile test driven development. Whenever a Dilbert strip comes out making fun of it, someone here Photoshops an "NT" onto the end of "AGILE" and forwards it around.
Singapore just hanged an Australian for drug trafficking and returned his body to Australia, where it was big news. The guy got caught with heroin when he landed at the airport in 2002. According to the Amnesty people, Singapore has hung 420 people since 1991 and most of these have been for drug-related cases.
If you're visiting Singapore, don't plan on hiding your stash under your scrotum since "no guy in the world will search you there". That's the first place they look.
I realize the parent poster was trying to be funny but it doesn't change the fact that (IMO) most Americans think our economy is completely built around serving them and that all Indians are tech support people for Dell.
No. Most Americans think all Dell tech support people are Indians. Not the other way around. Dell does not have a billion tech support people.
No, no, we need SALT, not hull heaters. Take the supertankers to the North Atlantic where the water is not sinking because it's too fresh, and dump the salt right there! The water gets heavier and sinks. Problem solved. You thought you were so hot, failing ocean current, but now you're dealing with America.
Now here's where the "can-do" attitude comes in. We need a quantity of salt sufficient for salinization of the meltwater entering the surface of the North Atlantic. Greenland has 2.5 million cubic kilometers of ice. Seawater has about 35 grams of salt per liter. So that means we need about 87500 cubic kilometers of salt, tops, in the worst case that Greenland completely melts. I figure we can get away with moving a cubic kilometer of salt a year to this location. We'll give this system a nice good push so that the BBC stays on cable and we can continue reminding Europeans whenever possible that we have saved Europe within living memory.
There were reports from Crawford that the president was seen reading a book about salt during his vacation. I think we may be seeing a national salt strategy very soon...
The FBI is going to want voIP providers to duplicate this remote recorder stopping flaw so that it works just like the POTS network that they're used to tapping!
I didn't realise 120 characters could piss you off so easily... good to know about the left...
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 12345678901234567890
Multiple viewers get to impatiently send multiple HTTP POST requests to the server, to help build a server failure. All server responses can be viewed as timeouts after some time, often showing just how close the server got to finishing before returning something closer to static.
I used to work in Redwood City, at a startup located in a converted print shop in the gritty section between Woodside and Fifth.
That place had the most lo-flo toilet from hell I ever saw. Basically, the rule was that if the flush was 100% liquid (no solids or paper) you could safely flush once. Otherwise, you had to carefully look at what you were about to flush, and decide if it might stick to the pipes- and if you thought it might, then you had to flush twice, maybe three times. And you never knew what the toilet was going to do when you flushed it. If people before you hadn't been flushing it enough, it would take revenge on a random flusher by regurgitating several gallons of filth all over the floor. Everybody had a horror story of being caught when that happened, frantically trying to stop it with a plunger and then mopping up the mess. When we had customer visits the toilet became horrible- the customers weren't used to our toilet and would single-flush which quickly made the toilet very angry. We were chronic customers of Roto-Rooter, who was over every so often to fix recurring problems with the toilet and the landlord got so sick of the costs that he secretly installed illicit toilets from Canada.
Now I work at a place in Santa Clara. This place has one evil urinal that flushes forever. God knows how many gallons this thing rips through in one minute. Since even the normal urinal flushes are so remarkably prolonged, the flusher is usually gone before realizing that his flush is never going to end. (This is even granting time for the customary pro forma soapless hand rinse to acknowledge any possible witnesses to his hygeine who are in the restroom with him and who forced him to flush the urinal in the first place.) I see it happen all the time. I come in, this thing is flushing, and I stop it by flushing one of the other urinals (usually the one with yellow water, there's always one of those). The drop in pressure disrupts the eternal flush and it stops. Then someone I don't know will come in, use that urinal, start it flushing, quickly rinse and dry his hands without soap to acknowledge my presence as a potential witness to his hygeine, and leave before realizing he's just started an eternal flush.
Aromatic compounds can certainly be hydrogenated (usually at very high H2 partial pressures and high temperatures, so the conditions inside the engine might do the trick), but such hydrogenation is carried out over a transition metal catalyst, typically platinum. What is the catalyst here?
I think you're on the wrong track. This isn't related to the way we saturate aromatic compounds with hydrogen gas- the polycyclic aromatic compounds aren't formed until the diesel burns, and the goal is to keep them from forming in the first place. The idea here I think is to get away with a higher air to fuel ratio than you could otherwise accomplish without the sputtering and misfires ordinarily associated with lean diesel mixtures. If you can get less C and more O and H into the cylinders, you'll see more energy-poor C-O and H-O bonds leaving the exhaust, and fewer energy-rich (and stinky) C-C and C-H bonds.
Energy is derived from the hydrogenation, and the hydrogenated products can then be combusted, but I seriously have to wonder if this actually yields a net benefit energetically.
Of course it takes more energy to produce the H2 than you can get from burning it, since the process isn't 100% efficient. You have to compare the losses associated with the hydrogen exchange to the losses associated with dirty diesel exhaust. I don't know how well it works. If a little hydrogen can prevent a lot of soot formation then this would be a big win energetically. But it's still annoying to see this setup described as "powered in part by hydrogen" since that doesn't describe it accurately at all.
The trucks are NOT "partially powered by hydrogen" except in a meaningless technical sense. The trucks are generating small amounts of hydrogen that they have generated (somewhat inefficiently) from water and alternator electricity, using energy derived from diesel fuel as usual. They then inject some of that hydrogen back into the engine for a cleaner burn.
Diesel engines produce soot (dirty filthy polycyclic aromatic compounds) which represents wasted energy and this is merely a way to cut down on the inefficiency represented by the unextracted energy leaving the exhaust. The mechanism by which adding hydrogen to the air-fuel mixture actually accomplishes this involves some complicated physical chemistry beyond the scope of the article- which goes into a misleading nonsequitur about how trucks might use hydrogen-powered fuel cells someday.
I had been thinking recently (just because it's an interesting problem) of ways to structure a political discussion site that would have no "axe to grind". Meaning, one that would rely more on application of a general algorithm rather than on policing or censorship by politically-motivated human moderators, in order to appeal to wide audiences rather than the partisan audiences that political sites tend to attract. People want to read opinions that reinforce and validate the opinions they already have, and so every political site winds up having a left or right slant. You end up with a bunch of people agreeing with each other, which is always boring. Intellectually honest debate between people of different political persuasions is rare, because the way things usually happen, true debate has to wait for a drive-by ambush from the occasional troll who ventures into a hostile forum. And trolls are rarely intellectually honest or interesting to talk to.
In a slash site you occasionally get to rank posts and influence what everyone sees, but moderator status is relatively rare, and aside from the preferences settings (flat/nested/threaded, mod level, topics, etc.), everyone who visits Slashdot sees more or less the same thing. Amazon's page appears different to everyone who goes there. You implicitly "moderate" items (always up) by visiting them and especially by making a purchase. Everyone who visits Amazon sees something different on the front page- depending on your surfing history on the site. Amazon figures you out by what you look at and suggests similar items. It isn't obvious how to do that with a discussion site, which usually relies on the fact that the page appears the same to everyone who visits. If the page displays differently in everyone's browser, then people in heated discussions start talking past each other. They're not on the same page. So the contents displayed in an individual discussion would need to be similar for everyone who participates. That imposes some restrictions on how the moderation mechanism can work if it deviates from the Slashdot model.
The site could maybe peg you politically, based on some metric you provide. Maybe every post you read could have links underneath it- "I agree with this post", "This guy is a bozo", etc. Then by clicking those links you give the site hints on stuff you want to see more of. The moderation could be applied not only to the post itself, as on Slashdot, but to the post's author (so that you'll see an author's posts more readily if you always mod his posts up- Slashdot sort of does this a little bit with the +1 Karma Bonus). Well-moderated posts should float up to high visibility as they do on Slashdot. But the moderation could also affect the system's characterization of you politically. Users could be mapped to positions in a multidimensional space of political viewpoints. You would be more likely to see something if it were written by someone "close" to you politically. (This seems to be what people are comfortable with.) But if it were a piece of writing highly regarded by people far away from you politically, you should see it too- so that you get exposed to the best, most well thought out opinions that seriously challenge your own.
That would be the goal, anyway. I can think of ways to assign users to arbitrary positions in a space based on a metric like post or story moderation, but then what do you do with those spatial positions? Do you use them to filter out individual posts? Visibility of new stories or topics? Or subthreads? Possibly you could prune something as large as a subthread, but individual post filtering doesn't always work very well even on Slashdot. 20 people will respond at +1 and +2 to some provocative statement that gets moderated to -2, which is a bit confusing. The rendered HTML makes it look like all these people are yelling at the grandparent.
Although the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed specifically to protect freedom of the press, the Supreme Court long neglected to use it to rule on libel cases, leaving libel laws mixed across the states. In 1964, however, the court issued an opinion in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, dramatically changing the nature of libel law in the United States. In that case, the court determined that public officials could only win a suit for libel if they could demonstrate "actual malice" on the part of reporters or publishers. In that case, "actual malice" was defined as "knowledge that the information was false" or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." This decision was later extended to cover "public figures", although the standard is still considerably lower in the case of private individuals.
In 1974, in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., (418 U.S. 323), the Supreme Court ruled that a plaintiff could not win a libel suit when the statement(s) in question were of opinion rather than fact. In the words of the court, "under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea". For example, contrast "I think Jo is a bad lawyer", which is opinion, with "Jo doesn't know the law", which is defamatory per se. In Gertz, the Supreme Court also established a mens rea or culpability requirement for defamation; states cannot impose strict liability because that would run afoul of the First Amendment. This holding differs significantly from most other common law jurisdictions, which still have strict liability for defamation.
In 1988, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, (485 U.S. 46), the Supreme Court ruled that a parody advertisement claiming Jerry Falwell had engaged in an incestuous act with his mother in an outhouse, while false, could not be subject to damages for emotional distress because the statement, in effect, was of a character as being so obviously ridiculous that it was clearly not true, and thus it could not be libelous if no one would seriously believe it. The court overturned a lower court's upholding of an award where the jury decided against the claim of libel but awarded damages for emotional distress.
What Canada needs is a First Amendment and a few "activist judges" to interpret and enforce it. Capitalism vs. socialism has nothing to do with this.
Re:Kind of
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Or even worse, the lack of an unsigned byte when reading in binary data structures. I don't claim to be a Java expert by any stretch (so I may be missing an obvious way to do this), but do you know how unnecessarily complex it is to convert a read-in byte to it's CORRECT unsigned value? Why isn't there an automatic way to do this at all? You can't just assign the byte to an int, as it'll still be negative (if above 127). I think in the end I just asigned the byte to an int, then did a bitwise-AND to throw out the extra sign bits it tacked on in the widening conversion so that it was back to positive.
InputStream.read() doesn't return a byte. It returns an int between 0 and 255 inclusive. -1 means EOF. The most common idiom is to do something like this: int i; int numRead = 0; while ((i=inputStream.read()) >= 0)
someByteArray[numRead++] = (byte)i;
For bytes with values between 128 and 255 inclusive, the values will become negative. And why do you care? As long as every single one of the eight bits in each byte is correct, signed vs. unsigned is in the eye of the beholder. It doesn't enter into anything unless you start doing arithmetic on the bytes or print their numeric values, both of which involve implicit casts to int. To do arithmetic, Java always converts a byte, char, or short to int using an automatic, implicit cast (it converts float to double as well). If the bytes have unsigned semantics in your program, then never allow the compiler to implement an implicit cast since implicit casts assume signed values. Replace them with explicit casts that mask out the top 24 bits to zero yourself, preserving the semantics with respect to sign:
int intVal = (0xFF & byteVal)
When evaluating this expression, byteVal will be implicitly cast to a signed int and then the & operator zeroes out the sign extension bits to preserve semantics. Is this "unnecessarily complex"? I don't think so. I rarely even need to do it.
This seems to horrify people used to the unsigned-type train wreck in ANSI C but I would not welcome unsigned types being added to Java at all. The existing type system in Java is perfectly adequate for getting work done and you don't have to keep remembering whether variables were declared as signed or not if you know they're always signed.
This is a variant on the zero-point-energy scam that TLC and the Discovery Channel always cover in breathless interviews with crackpots. Basically this guy is saying you can make your electrons fall further into the nucleus from their ground state and pocket the energy as they go in. And all these billions of years, these electrons haven't bothered to make this energy transition until you came along because...?
This is actually related to a legitimate, clever idea that would be really cool if it actually worked: muon catalyzed fusion. You introduce muons into cold hydrogen and get them into covalent bonds between hydrogen nuclei. Muons are 200 times heavier than electrons so this means the orbital is small and tight, placing the nuclei so close to each other that they tunnel through a barrier and fuse into helium, releasing the muon to take part in further reactions. It isn't economical because muons are expensive to make (about 100 MeV) and decay in two microseconds into an electron and two neutrinos (which are notorious energy sinks- their energy is not even recoverable via thermalization, it's just gone). To become economical, the muon has to catalyze over a hundred reactions before it decays, but its lifetime is only a few percent of what is needed. Fusion is one bummer after another.
The second article in as many months. I now know of a second target for big oil.
Cars running on magnesium or aluminum would be just great for "big oil", nor would they really be "making their own fuel" except in an immediate technical sense, because active metals like these cannot be obtained from their oxidized forms without massive quantities of electricity. And they only occur naturally as things like oxides- so much that before electricity and the electrolysis process, metallic aluminum was actually considered a precious metal, with a value comparable to silver. To make just one gram of aluminum requires 3 amp hours of electricity, moving up a potential of about 5 volts, in an electric-arc furnace. They do it in the Northwest where there is cheap hydro power.
Hydrogen is the same way. There's hydrogen everywhere, but gaseous (reduced) hydrogen is a commodity on a planet with an oxidizing atmosphere.
Yes, you're on to me. It's a conspiracy. I go through the trouble of maintaining fifty other accounts which all have mod points. I then take shortcuts with terms like "translation product" in ways that are not approved of by biological grammar Nazis and I then dispatch my army of droid moderators to mod myself up into the stratosphere just to annoy you since I hit the karma cap years ago. Please promise you won't tell anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
So, while you might be quick to think "we still need to burn fossil fuels to produce this hydrogen", the point is, currently it's a WASTE material.
That's in the eye of the beholder. Solid oxide fuel cells can use carbon monoxide as fuel just as well as hydrogen. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance. The guy who first prepared it in 1776 by heating ZnO and coke even thought he had made hydrogen because the blue flame it produces is so similar. I don't have numbers for CO and H2 handy, and if I did I'd be too lazy to check, but I'd suspect that burning a mole of CO releases more energy than burning a mole of H2, just by virtue of the fact that this bacterium makes its living converting H2O + CO -> CO2 + H2.
I assume they're carbon based life forms
Of course they are. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance and is surprisingly inert. It kills you by forming a stable complex with the hemoglobin in your blood. It adheres to binding sites meant for oxygen (cyanide has an even greater affinity) and ruins the entire hemoglobin molecule. Bacteria generally have no use for oxygen binding and transport proteins, and do not use hemoglobin or any other heme-containing protein (except for nitrogen-fixing bacteria), so in general one would not expect them to care about carbon monoxide- although being able to eat it is impressive.
Here at Agilent we love agile test driven development. Whenever a Dilbert strip comes out making fun of it, someone here Photoshops an "NT" onto the end of "AGILE" and forwards it around.
I just tell them to watch Superman III. It's just like that.
Singapore just hanged an Australian for drug trafficking and returned his body to Australia, where it was big news. The guy got caught with heroin when he landed at the airport in 2002. According to the Amnesty people, Singapore has hung 420 people since 1991 and most of these have been for drug-related cases.
If you're visiting Singapore, don't plan on hiding your stash under your scrotum since "no guy in the world will search you there". That's the first place they look.
Yep, he's a fakir all right. [Ducks]
I realize the parent poster was trying to be funny but it doesn't change the fact that (IMO) most Americans think our economy is completely built around serving them and that all Indians are tech support people for Dell.
No. Most Americans think all Dell tech support people are Indians. Not the other way around. Dell does not have a billion tech support people.
No need to fix any links on your website; we just want the money. And here's the address to send it to:
BELLSOUTH ATLANTA
BEHIND THE HOT WATER PIPES
THIRD WASHROOM ALONG VICTORIA STATION
$404 File Not Found
The requested URL was not found.
If you want to buy this page load, mail the $404 in cash in an envelope addressed to
BellSouth Corporation Headquarters
1155 Peachtree St. NE
Suite 404
Atlanta, GA 30309-3610
No, no, we need SALT, not hull heaters. Take the supertankers to the North Atlantic where the water is not sinking because it's too fresh, and dump the salt right there! The water gets heavier and sinks. Problem solved. You thought you were so hot, failing ocean current, but now you're dealing with America.
Now here's where the "can-do" attitude comes in. We need a quantity of salt sufficient for salinization of the meltwater entering the surface of the North Atlantic. Greenland has 2.5 million cubic kilometers of ice. Seawater has about 35 grams of salt per liter. So that means we need about 87500 cubic kilometers of salt, tops, in the worst case that Greenland completely melts. I figure we can get away with moving a cubic kilometer of salt a year to this location. We'll give this system a nice good push so that the BBC stays on cable and we can continue reminding Europeans whenever possible that we have saved Europe within living memory.
There were reports from Crawford that the president was seen reading a book about salt during his vacation. I think we may be seeing a national salt strategy very soon...
The FBI is going to want voIP providers to duplicate this remote recorder stopping flaw so that it works just like the POTS network that they're used to tapping!
I didn't realise 120 characters could piss you off so easily... good to know about the left...
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 12345678901234567890
All right, it fits!
Racism exists primarily in the minds of the left to give them relevance. The rest of us just get along.
In case anyone wonders why the parent was moderated "Flamebait", this was the guy's sig just five minutes ago.
I could be in a minority, but I almost never look at author links.
And I never look at miserable failure links. That's miserable failure links. The links that say miserable failure. I skip right over them.
Multiple viewers get to impatiently send multiple HTTP POST requests to the server, to help build a server failure. All server responses can be viewed as timeouts after some time, often showing just how close the server got to finishing before returning something closer to static.
I used to work in Redwood City, at a startup located in a converted print shop in the gritty section between Woodside and Fifth.
That place had the most lo-flo toilet from hell I ever saw. Basically, the rule was that if the flush was 100% liquid (no solids or paper) you could safely flush once. Otherwise, you had to carefully look at what you were about to flush, and decide if it might stick to the pipes- and if you thought it might, then you had to flush twice, maybe three times. And you never knew what the toilet was going to do when you flushed it. If people before you hadn't been flushing it enough, it would take revenge on a random flusher by regurgitating several gallons of filth all over the floor. Everybody had a horror story of being caught when that happened, frantically trying to stop it with a plunger and then mopping up the mess. When we had customer visits the toilet became horrible- the customers weren't used to our toilet and would single-flush which quickly made the toilet very angry. We were chronic customers of Roto-Rooter, who was over every so often to fix recurring problems with the toilet and the landlord got so sick of the costs that he secretly installed illicit toilets from Canada.
Now I work at a place in Santa Clara. This place has one evil urinal that flushes forever. God knows how many gallons this thing rips through in one minute. Since even the normal urinal flushes are so remarkably prolonged, the flusher is usually gone before realizing that his flush is never going to end. (This is even granting time for the customary pro forma soapless hand rinse to acknowledge any possible witnesses to his hygeine who are in the restroom with him and who forced him to flush the urinal in the first place.) I see it happen all the time. I come in, this thing is flushing, and I stop it by flushing one of the other urinals (usually the one with yellow water, there's always one of those). The drop in pressure disrupts the eternal flush and it stops. Then someone I don't know will come in, use that urinal, start it flushing, quickly rinse and dry his hands without soap to acknowledge my presence as a potential witness to his hygeine, and leave before realizing he's just started an eternal flush.
Aromatic compounds can certainly be hydrogenated (usually at very high H2 partial pressures and high temperatures, so the conditions inside the engine might do the trick), but such hydrogenation is carried out over a transition metal catalyst, typically platinum. What is the catalyst here?
I think you're on the wrong track. This isn't related to the way we saturate aromatic compounds with hydrogen gas- the polycyclic aromatic compounds aren't formed until the diesel burns, and the goal is to keep them from forming in the first place. The idea here I think is to get away with a higher air to fuel ratio than you could otherwise accomplish without the sputtering and misfires ordinarily associated with lean diesel mixtures. If you can get less C and more O and H into the cylinders, you'll see more energy-poor C-O and H-O bonds leaving the exhaust, and fewer energy-rich (and stinky) C-C and C-H bonds.
Energy is derived from the hydrogenation, and the hydrogenated products can then be combusted, but I seriously have to wonder if this actually yields a net benefit energetically.
Of course it takes more energy to produce the H2 than you can get from burning it, since the process isn't 100% efficient. You have to compare the losses associated with the hydrogen exchange to the losses associated with dirty diesel exhaust. I don't know how well it works. If a little hydrogen can prevent a lot of soot formation then this would be a big win energetically. But it's still annoying to see this setup described as "powered in part by hydrogen" since that doesn't describe it accurately at all.
The trucks are NOT "partially powered by hydrogen" except in a meaningless technical sense. The trucks are generating small amounts of hydrogen that they have generated (somewhat inefficiently) from water and alternator electricity, using energy derived from diesel fuel as usual. They then inject some of that hydrogen back into the engine for a cleaner burn.
Diesel engines produce soot (dirty filthy polycyclic aromatic compounds) which represents wasted energy and this is merely a way to cut down on the inefficiency represented by the unextracted energy leaving the exhaust. The mechanism by which adding hydrogen to the air-fuel mixture actually accomplishes this involves some complicated physical chemistry beyond the scope of the article- which goes into a misleading nonsequitur about how trucks might use hydrogen-powered fuel cells someday.
I had been thinking recently (just because it's an interesting problem) of ways to structure a political discussion site that would have no "axe to grind". Meaning, one that would rely more on application of a general algorithm rather than on policing or censorship by politically-motivated human moderators, in order to appeal to wide audiences rather than the partisan audiences that political sites tend to attract. People want to read opinions that reinforce and validate the opinions they already have, and so every political site winds up having a left or right slant. You end up with a bunch of people agreeing with each other, which is always boring. Intellectually honest debate between people of different political persuasions is rare, because the way things usually happen, true debate has to wait for a drive-by ambush from the occasional troll who ventures into a hostile forum. And trolls are rarely intellectually honest or interesting to talk to.
In a slash site you occasionally get to rank posts and influence what everyone sees, but moderator status is relatively rare, and aside from the preferences settings (flat/nested/threaded, mod level, topics, etc.), everyone who visits Slashdot sees more or less the same thing. Amazon's page appears different to everyone who goes there. You implicitly "moderate" items (always up) by visiting them and especially by making a purchase. Everyone who visits Amazon sees something different on the front page- depending on your surfing history on the site. Amazon figures you out by what you look at and suggests similar items. It isn't obvious how to do that with a discussion site, which usually relies on the fact that the page appears the same to everyone who visits. If the page displays differently in everyone's browser, then people in heated discussions start talking past each other. They're not on the same page. So the contents displayed in an individual discussion would need to be similar for everyone who participates. That imposes some restrictions on how the moderation mechanism can work if it deviates from the Slashdot model.
The site could maybe peg you politically, based on some metric you provide. Maybe every post you read could have links underneath it- "I agree with this post", "This guy is a bozo", etc. Then by clicking those links you give the site hints on stuff you want to see more of. The moderation could be applied not only to the post itself, as on Slashdot, but to the post's author (so that you'll see an author's posts more readily if you always mod his posts up- Slashdot sort of does this a little bit with the +1 Karma Bonus). Well-moderated posts should float up to high visibility as they do on Slashdot. But the moderation could also affect the system's characterization of you politically. Users could be mapped to positions in a multidimensional space of political viewpoints. You would be more likely to see something if it were written by someone "close" to you politically. (This seems to be what people are comfortable with.) But if it were a piece of writing highly regarded by people far away from you politically, you should see it too- so that you get exposed to the best, most well thought out opinions that seriously challenge your own.
That would be the goal, anyway. I can think of ways to assign users to arbitrary positions in a space based on a metric like post or story moderation, but then what do you do with those spatial positions? Do you use them to filter out individual posts? Visibility of new stories or topics? Or subthreads? Possibly you could prune something as large as a subthread, but individual post filtering doesn't always work very well even on Slashdot. 20 people will respond at +1 and +2 to some provocative statement that gets moderated to -2, which is a bit confusing. The rendered HTML makes it look like all these people are yelling at the grandparent.
What Canada needs is a First Amendment and a few "activist judges" to interpret and enforce it. Capitalism vs. socialism has nothing to do with this.
All 8 of the Dover school board's intelligent designers just had their asses handed to them by the voters today.
Or even worse, the lack of an unsigned byte when reading in binary data structures. I don't claim to be a Java expert by any stretch (so I may be missing an obvious way to do this), but do you know how unnecessarily complex it is to convert a read-in byte to it's CORRECT unsigned value? Why isn't there an automatic way to do this at all? You can't just assign the byte to an int, as it'll still be negative (if above 127). I think in the end I just asigned the byte to an int, then did a bitwise-AND to throw out the extra sign bits it tacked on in the widening conversion so that it was back to positive.
InputStream.read() doesn't return a byte. It returns an int between 0 and 255 inclusive. -1 means EOF. The most common idiom is to do something like this:
int i;
int numRead = 0;
while ((i=inputStream.read()) >= 0)
someByteArray[numRead++] = (byte)i;
For bytes with values between 128 and 255 inclusive, the values will become negative. And why do you care? As long as every single one of the eight bits in each byte is correct, signed vs. unsigned is in the eye of the beholder. It doesn't enter into anything unless you start doing arithmetic on the bytes or print their numeric values, both of which involve implicit casts to int. To do arithmetic, Java always converts a byte, char, or short to int using an automatic, implicit cast (it converts float to double as well). If the bytes have unsigned semantics in your program, then never allow the compiler to implement an implicit cast since implicit casts assume signed values. Replace them with explicit casts that mask out the top 24 bits to zero yourself, preserving the semantics with respect to sign:
int intVal = (0xFF & byteVal)
When evaluating this expression, byteVal will be implicitly cast to a signed int and then the & operator zeroes out the sign extension bits to preserve semantics. Is this "unnecessarily complex"? I don't think so. I rarely even need to do it.
This seems to horrify people used to the unsigned-type train wreck in ANSI C but I would not welcome unsigned types being added to Java at all. The existing type system in Java is perfectly adequate for getting work done and you don't have to keep remembering whether variables were declared as signed or not if you know they're always signed.
This is a variant on the zero-point-energy scam that TLC and the Discovery Channel always cover in breathless interviews with crackpots. Basically this guy is saying you can make your electrons fall further into the nucleus from their ground state and pocket the energy as they go in. And all these billions of years, these electrons haven't bothered to make this energy transition until you came along because...?
This is actually related to a legitimate, clever idea that would be really cool if it actually worked: muon catalyzed fusion. You introduce muons into cold hydrogen and get them into covalent bonds between hydrogen nuclei. Muons are 200 times heavier than electrons so this means the orbital is small and tight, placing the nuclei so close to each other that they tunnel through a barrier and fuse into helium, releasing the muon to take part in further reactions. It isn't economical because muons are expensive to make (about 100 MeV) and decay in two microseconds into an electron and two neutrinos (which are notorious energy sinks- their energy is not even recoverable via thermalization, it's just gone). To become economical, the muon has to catalyze over a hundred reactions before it decays, but its lifetime is only a few percent of what is needed. Fusion is one bummer after another.
The second article in as many months. I now know of a second target for big oil.
Cars running on magnesium or aluminum would be just great for "big oil", nor would they really be "making their own fuel" except in an immediate technical sense, because active metals like these cannot be obtained from their oxidized forms without massive quantities of electricity. And they only occur naturally as things like oxides- so much that before electricity and the electrolysis process, metallic aluminum was actually considered a precious metal, with a value comparable to silver. To make just one gram of aluminum requires 3 amp hours of electricity, moving up a potential of about 5 volts, in an electric-arc furnace. They do it in the Northwest where there is cheap hydro power.
Hydrogen is the same way. There's hydrogen everywhere, but gaseous (reduced) hydrogen is a commodity on a planet with an oxidizing atmosphere.
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Yes, you're on to me. It's a conspiracy. I go through the trouble of maintaining fifty other accounts which all have mod points. I then take shortcuts with terms like "translation product" in ways that are not approved of by biological grammar Nazis and I then dispatch my army of droid moderators to mod myself up into the stratosphere just to annoy you since I hit the karma cap years ago. Please promise you won't tell anybody.